Can’t wait until the 2008 baseball season for more scenes of the city people used to call “the Mistake on the Lake”? Pick up any of Les Roberts‘s 13 Cleveland-based mysteries about the Slovenian sleuth, Milan Jacovich, which include Deep Shaker, Full Cleveland, Pepper Pike and the recent The Irish Sports Pages, all published by Gray & Co. www.grayco.com.

Roberts was the mystery columnist for the Plain Dealer when I was the book editor, so I can’t pretend to neutrality about his klobasa-sandwich-loving private investigator. But the Washington Post said of the first Milan Jacovich novel, The Cleveland Connection: “There’s an affection for Cleveland and an insistence on its ethnic, working-class life that gives vividness to the detection. Roberts writes with sharp wit, creates action scenes that are drawn with flair, and puts emotional life into a range of people.”

Roberts www.lesroberts.com is a former Californian whose love for his adopted city helps to drive the series. So you may not be surprised to hear that he’s a serious Indians fan: He appears on the dust jacket of one Milan Jacovich novel, The Lake Effect, in a Tribe jacket.